Epilogue

I left it all out on stage.

Aw yeah.

A Personal Pep Talk

Today's post is a discussion on fear, inspired by true events.

I am afraid. I am afraid of many things -- of everything, just about -- but this is going to be mostly about fear with regards to acting.

Tomorrow I'm putting up a scene in class for one of my toughest teachers, but it isn't him I'm worried about disappointing. It's myself.

The scene is the confession from Martha in The Children's Hour just before she commits suicide and it terrifies me. I picked it. I wanted to do it. I wanted to challenge myself and I love the role. I know that I have it within me to connect, that I am equal to the task. I know this in my soul. But I am afraid that I will fall short. It's a daunting scene. It's demanding. It isn't even that I feel ill-prepared, although we've never put the thing on its feet. Our lines are memorized, I've done most of my homework, but I'm so scared of it that just thinking about the scene sends panic through my veins.

If I can relax, be open, be honest...it's a rehearsal and nothing else. But there's the part of me that feels unequal. There's a part of me that thinks that I'm not, as I said in Physical Acting the other day, "larger than life."

This is the struggle Terri saw in me the day she told me I was on the "verge of being a great presence" and that I had the "potential to be a leading lady". But she called me erratic and said that on stage, there were moments of connection and truth and then suddenly I would shift and become someone self-conscious. She said I needed to find out who I am on my own terms. That I ought to pick one of those people to be and be it fully. I want to be the one who connects to the truth. I don't want to be self-conscious. I let fear rule me, both in life and in art.

This is why, on Wednesday, I'll be starting therapy. We're going to work on my anxiety and my ability to cope with it and to be in the present. I don't want to have to escape anymore. I want to be able to escape, but I don't want to feel like I can't handle my life without pretending to be living a different one.

I am not a movie star or a spy or a superhero or a Jedi. I am not a witch or a genius or a member of Starfleet or an elf or the little sister of anyone romantically heroic. I am Vanessa Lauren Bellew, for better or worse, who suffers sometimes and hurts sometimes and fails sometimes, but who also loves and smiles and sings and sometimes, just sometimes, wins. Succeeds. There is the clown inside of me on whom it is always raining, who cries at nothing and feels failure more keenly than anything else. I am an expert at that and now I will be an expert at life. At the present.

I watched two episodes of Charlie Rose today, one of them on my teacher's recommendation and one of them on a whim of my own. The first is Jeff Bridges and the second is Robin Williams. I was struck by the honesty and openness of both and by their ideas about acting, fear, addiction, and life.

Jeff Bridges
Robin Williams

I was struck particularly by Jeff Bridges' assertion that fear is necessary, particularly to acting. That the thing to be truly afraid of in acting is the absence of fear. That fear is something to be used and ought to be and can make you a great actor. Fear is part of the thrill of acting. But you cannot let it use you. You cannot be daunted by a role, by a task, by an emotional journey.

Maybe I ought to be using the word 'I' instead of 'you'. I'm beginning to trust myself more and more through my life journey and my time at Circle. I'm learning that it's okay, even good sometimes, to fail.

Alan, during an exercise in class, always mentions that if you're open, honest, present, and truthful...if you're private in public, what's the worst that can happen? You won't die.

During his interview, Robin Williams talks about why he is not completely free on stage. Why there are places he doesn't/can't go. He says that he weighs the reward of going somewhere with the consequences. Can he deal with the consequences of delving into that part of himself?

I have been to this part of myself and back again. Without medicine. Without help. I did it on my own, tooth and fucking nail, pulling myself up with desperation even when I was listless, and sometimes falling again harder and farther than the progress I'd made. Acting is the safe place to explore it. Acting is the safe way to explore it. I don't want to cheat myself out of the experience and, God, think of the victory, think of the joy, the exaltation, think of the growth if I even come close to succeeding. Succeeding. What does that even mean?

I don't want success. I want truth. I want connection. I want honesty and openness and to be private in public. Truly private. Without self-consciousness, without thought to the people sitting in the chairs out of my space, without care to what Alan might say. I know what Alan will say. He will say that my personal story was remarkable on its own, that that itself is truly something of which to be proud. Fuck judgment, fuck my own judgment, fuck the idea that fear is something bigger than I am.

I am bigger than fear. Fear is an idea. Fear is a narration. From now on, I narrate my life, my art, differently. I narrate with my own voice.

On Friday, I opened up my voice in Singing Technique and my teacher said "that's the voice of your soul". I want to narrate with that voice.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but action in the face of it.

And that's what I'm doing. Acting.

Fuck yeah.

My Superpower Revealed

Ew. I just reread, nearly twenty-four hours later, the post from yesterday. Ew. The resistance to it is stronger now than it was earlier. It isn't that it isn't truthful, I don't think. I'm not sure what my problem is, but there definitely is one of some kind.

Anyway, it doesn't really matter because the importance of last night's post isn't the contents, but the fact that I posted at all. I wrote.

I have not written in a long, long time. Well. Since November 1st, which is a really long time for me. I went through a period (ending last night, apparently) after I quit RPing when I could not stand the thought of writing out anything. I guess I'm still suffering from that. After all, it was writing that made me miserable* in the first place, and if I'm writing then I'm not out there living life, right?

But I can't deny that writing is a huge part of who I am creatively, and since I am a mostly creative being, that makes going without it something like going without food or water or sex. Probably more like going without sex than the other two, really.

So I may be a little rusty. Forgive me. I don't know who I'm talking to, really. Forgive me, Vanessa. Oh, hey, Vanessa, you're forgiven. Of course, I say that, but I'm totally still judging myself. Oh, me. When will I ever learn?

What's exciting about last night's post is that it whetted my appetite. All day long, I thought about what else I could write about and invented funny things to say or had an idea and immediately wanted to put it on here.**

I guess I needed a release.

I have a teacher named Ken -- Physical Acting -- who is a very wise man. He told me the other day that maybe my vice of making up someone who is like me but lives a different life, of pretending to be other people to escape my own problems, is like my superpower. He compared me to Cyclops of the X-Men. Cyclops, as a teenager, suddenly had these eye-beams that shot out at everything and destroyed whatever he happened to have in his field of vision. He couldn't control it; it controlled him. And then one day Professor Xavier came along and was like, "Hey. Take these rose quartz sunglasses and put them on. Not only will it keep you from destroying everything, but the chicks dig 'em. Especially Jean." Xavier then went on to explain to Cyclops how eye-beams are a sometimes power just like cookies are a sometimes food. Cyclops wears glasses to function, but he still whips them off and shoots shit up with his eye-beams sometimes whenever the situation calls for it.

These were not Ken's exact words for his metaphor, but I embellished. The point is, I can't expect to completely disregard my superpower, my vice, my coping mechanism, and suddenly demand to live a healthy life. Sometimes a healthy life demands coping mechanisms, superpowers, vices. So this is a good place to start.

Writing. But for now, I'll just write for me. About me. My thoughts. That way I don't fall into the trap that I'm only just now beginning to really get myself out of. From which I'm only just now beginning to extract myself. Can't end a sentence in a preposition. Or use sentence fragments. Or begin a sentence with a conjunction. Whoops.

Even if I'm channeling everything into acting right now, I still need a release valve to let off some of the pressure so I don't explode. Okay. Too many metaphors now.

I plan on doing this very frequently and I don't plan on holding much back, so buckle up, ladies and gentlemen.





* The writing isn't what really made me miserable, but I associate it with it. Also, my good friend Anxiety was pretty successful at convincing me that if I started to write or journal or something that I might fall apart entirely or have to deal with things I don't want to think about at the moment. So far so good, though!

** I did not actually put most of these thoughts and funny ideas in this entry. Except where I talk about how I immediately wanted to write again.

Pride Comes Before the Fall

I've just finished reading The Philadelphia Story by Phillip Barry, and like so many other things in my life recently, my response to it was a measure of how much I've changed in how I view the world and myself within it.

I'm no stranger to the story or script of The Philadelphia Story. It has for a long time been one of my favorite films. I want to believe that I first saw it at my father's mother's (Mama Kate's) house. I have a vague (but potentially totally imaginary) memory of sitting in her living room on her very worn couch and being utterly enchanted by the elegance and grace of the actors and the wittiness of the dialogue. I know that it was my first Katharine Hepburn movie, or at least the first movie where I was aware of who she was and remembered her after. For a long time, I would watch the movie as something purely for entertainment. It was a comedy, light and frothy and nothing much more. I admired Katharine Hepburn and I admired Tracy Lord (not to be confused with Traci Lords, the former underage porn star) for being such a clear representation of everything I thought a modern woman ought to be: fiercely intelligent, a tower of strength, sarcastic, classy, educated, noble, beautiful, desired, with high standards of behavior for herself and others. I never thought twice of her fall from grace, the tragic hero's ultimate trajectory. To me it was natural to want to marry someone suave like CK Dexter Haven rather than some stiff like George Kittredge, who didn't have the secret key to what was within the tower. So I suppose in a way I was subconsciously wanting the fall all along, but terrified of it.

The scariest part of skiing, after all, is pointing your skis down the mountain. Because what if you don't stop?

Tracy Lord was everything I wanted to be when I became a woman and everything I was jealous of -- money, connections, a life of style and refinement and privilege. I always have had champagne tastes. Certainly I have always had my blows softened for me, as Dexter suggests of Tracy, and if someone else could not soften them, then I would imagine a softening myself or else pretend it never happened.

I am now nearly twenty-four, the same age as Tracy in the play. I am not, as almost a woman -- or am I one? -- all those things I always dreamed I would be and certainly I am not at all Tracy Lord. I am fiercely intelligent, yes, beautiful, noble on occasion, strong when I must be and getting stronger every day, I am sarcastic and classy when I want to be, educated...but I am much more human coming to twenty-four than Tracy. I have had many a fall and have stopped attempting to escape the blows or even to soften them. I no longer imagine myself a tower of strength, and though my standards for myself and others are particularly high still, they are much lower than they once were and plummeting even farther down with each passing day. I am not particularly tolerant of people that I consider "beneath me," be it in intelligence or class or standards of living, and even harder on those in whom I see my old or current faults.

But the point is that when reading the script for The Philadelphia Story today, though I was taken as I always am with the cleverness of the writing and was, of course, thoroughly entertained, I enjoyed it on a completely different level: I appreciated the fall. I couldn't wait for the fall. I loved every second of it. I empathized. I was Tracy. I delighted in each misstep she took and urged her more and more past her delusion, wanted her to falter, encouraged her to misbehave, to go "haywire," as Elizabeth Imbrie says, celebrated her public humiliations, her failures, the upheaval of everything she thought she knew.

This is a huge step for me. I certainly still have my trouble falling in my acting and though I tend to wind up on my face repeatedly in life, my pride often gets in the way of my ability to admit that I tripped and especially that I may need help getting up.

Pride is not a bad thing by any means, but as I become a woman, as I turn twenty-four, as I start to willingly free-fall in life, I think the next thing I ought to learn, and the thing that will help me come to terms with and better discover who I truly am (as Terri suggested, I'd like to own my trials and triumphs so that I can be done with being erratic and start with being a leading lady) is when to replace pride with humility.

Part of me is resistant to this entire entry. A voice says this isn't entirely true, or at least that I may be pandering to people who might read this as I write it. Or that I want so badly to have discovered something by the strangely emotional experience of reading The Philadelphia Story that I'm reaching for anything that applies. But I just started to type and here it is, so whether it's completely honest or not, it is what it is.

I don't know. I feel hopeful, though.